Hiring freeze puts squeeze on federal prosecutors in Arizona

It’s impossible put a price on justice, but for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona, justice has to come within budget.

Lately, the budget has been tight.

The number of staff attorneys within the agency has dwindled in recent years because of federal budget constraints, forcing U.S. Attorney John S. Leonardo to be judicious in how best to use the manpower available to the office.

The U.S. Department of Justice has had a nationwide hiring freeze in place since 2010 — with the exception of a brief period in early 2013 — meaning that natural attrition has cut into the ranks, Leonardo said.

The Arizona office is programmed for 170 attorneys and 147 support personnel. Instead, it has 143 attorneys and 117 support personnel.

“We can’t hire to replace the people we’ve lost, so we’re down 18 percent of our workforce, and there seems to be no end in sight in terms of the hiring freeze,” Leonardo said.

Leonardo, a former judge who took the helm of the agency in July 2012, offered his first detailed public comments on the office’s outlook during a recent interview with The Arizona Republic at the agency’s high-rise office in Phoenix.

With fewer prosecutors available for federal cases, fewer federal crimes are being prosecuted. U.S. District Court records for Arizona illustrate the beginning of a downward trend.

According to court records, 6,384 federal criminal cases were seen through to completion in fiscal 2010. The number of completed cases climbed to 8,794 in 2011 but dropped to 7,829 in 2012, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

The final figures for 2013 still are being compiled, but they are likely to continue the downward trend when they are published in a few months, Leonardo said.

Meanwhile, the number of civil cases seen through to completion has maintained a slow upward tick. Those cases went from 3,652 in 2010 to 3,897 in 2011 and to 4,031 in 2012, according to court records.

But those figures are likely to dip when the final 2013 statistics are published, Leonardo said.

“You just try to make do with what you’ve got. It puts a lot of extra pressures on the workforce if you try to maintain the same levels with fewer people. You can’t always do it,” he said.

Regardless of the office’s staffing levels the past few years, the top three areas of emphasis have remained the same — drug crimes, immigration cases and crimes on American Indian reservations.

“It just comes with this district,” said Leonardo, who served as a Pima County Superior Court judge for 19 years and presided over more than 380 jury trials before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“That’s what we have here. And we always will have very large segments of our resources devoted to those areas,” he said.

Leonardo became the top federal prosecutor in Arizona nearly a year after the resignation of former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke, who oversaw Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled gun-running investigation that allowed hundreds of untracked weapons to land in the hands of Mexican criminals.

Unlike Burke’s talkative style in the position, Leonardo’s style is low-key, calming and professional, said former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton, who now is a partner with the law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

“Given what the office has gone through recently, he’s really the perfect fit for that office to make sure that everybody is on an even keel and doing what it is they’re supposed to do. I think he’s the right person for the right time,” Charlton said.

“Because of Fast and Furious, it was appropriate to find someone like John,” he said.

Leonardo has kept a fairly low profile. For example, he twice declined through a spokesman to sit for a new photograph for this article. Furthermore, he has continued to live and keep his primary office in Tucson. He commutes a couple of days a week to the agency’s larger branch in Phoenix.

He brings a sense of dignity and professionalism to the agency, said Sally Simmons, presiding judge of the Pima County Superior Court.

“His demeanor on the bench was always very proper, and he had a great sense of the importance of the courts as the third branch of government. And he strove, it seemed to me, to always be very fair-minded,” she said.

As a judge, Leonardo demanded that attorneys who appeared before him be prepared and conduct themselves professionally, Simmons said.

Leonardo said he has preached even-handedness and fairness to his staff at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“I don’t think it’s been much of a hard sell. Most of the attorneys that work in this office are of that frame of mind,” he said.

With that guidance, the agency’s focus is on its big three — immigration, drugs and reservation crimes.

Smuggling across Arizona’s southern border drives up the number of drug and immigration cases, he said. Jurisdictional requirements that call for federal prosecutions of serious crimes on reservations account for the number of reservation cases.

Combined, border and reservation crimes account for more than half of the agency’s workload.

Immigration cases accounted for 47.1 percent of all closed criminal-defendant cases in 2012, according to District Court records.

Marijuana and other drug cases represented a combined 27 percent of closed criminal-defendant cases in 2012.

Felony cases on Arizona’s 22 reservations accounted for approximately 4.3 percent of the cases, according to U.S. Attorney’s Office records.

While the U.S. Attorney’s Office processes thousands of immigration cases every year, prosecutors can’t keep up with the number of cases referred by the U.S. Border Patrol, Leonardo said.

“We don’t prosecute everybody that is arrested crossing the border illegally simply because we don’t have the resources. Neither the U.S. Attorney’s Office nor the courts have the resources to do that,” he said.

As a result, prosecutors use a graduated approach. They check the backgrounds of border-crossers before deciding which ones to prosecute.

“If you are entering for the first time and you don’t have a prior formal deportation or any prior criminal record, then we don’t prosecute,” he said.

In 2012, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona charged fewer than a quarter of all arrested illegal border-crossers. The others simply were deported.

Leonardo declined to offer an assessment of the circumstances that created a system that arrests far many more border-crossers than can be prosecuted.

“We don’t make the laws. We don’t change them. We don’t interpret them. We just try to enforce them to the extent that we can with the limited resources we have,” he said.

Arizona’s border also serves as one of the primary gateways for illegal drugs into the country. As a result, his office handled approximately 10 percent of all federal drug cases prosecuted in the U.S., Leonardo said.

“The most effective thing is to get at people who run drug-smuggling organizations,” he said. “Of course, the larger the load, the more effective we can be if we can effect arrest and prosecutionsof the larger operators.”

Concerning crimes on reservations, U.S. Attorney’s Office personnel have reached out to tribal police forces to strengthen and streamline interactions between the federal and tribal agencies, he said.

In 2012, the agency prosecuted 408 felonies committed on Arizona’s reservations, which represented 33 percent of all felony prosecutions from reservations nationally, Leonardo said. The federal agency takes the lead in prosecuting major crimes such as murders, rapes, kidnappings and major assaults.

Those cases frequently require personal attention by attorneys who are based hundreds of miles away in Phoenix, Flagstaff and Tucson.

One-on-one interaction with tribal law-enforcement authorities and crime victims is necessary to build trust and to be effective, Leonardo said.

“These communities are tight-knit. At times it’s difficult to get witnesses to testify against people they know and live with, as it would be with any small community,” he said.

U.S. Attorney’s Office personnel have made appropriate efforts to work with tribal authorities, said Jesse Delmar, chief of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Police Department and president of the Indian Country Intelligence Network, an association of federal, state and tribal law-enforcement agencies.

“Regardless of whether you’re in a remote area or near a metropolitan area like Phoenix or Tucson, the interaction is on a daily basis,” Delmar said.

Prosecutors have been fair under Leonardo’s leadership, he said.

“It’s like anywhere else — if you have proper cause to arrest someone, then you have proper cause,” he said. “Each case depends upon proper cause. If it exists, then whoever the law-enforcement agency is, whoever the prosecuting agency is, they’re obligated to act.”

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